Fighting The Left As A Libertarian: Jeff Deist Interview
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Dan talk to Jeff Deist. They talk about economics, Covid, and Disneyland security. Jeff is the president of the Mises Institute, where he serves as a writer, public speaker, and advocate for property, markets, and civil society. He is the host of The Human Action Podcast. He previously worked as a longtime advisor and chief of staff to former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. Topics Discussed State of society Mises Institute Economics for the younger generation How economics is all encompassing Austrian economics Economics being a social science Finding ways to implement Libertarianism into society Federal Reserve Ron DeSantis Baby boomers Unseen consequences of economic policies Riots Disneyland security Subscriber Portion Civilization Ownership Jeff's religious origins Inside stories of Ron Paul Great reset What Trump's victory meant 10 questions
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Kyle, and you'll notice that...
Not Ethan.
We are about 50 pounds lighter.
This is a test to see if Ethan actually watches the interview show because I'll get a message from him.
Otherwise, I won't.
How would I do it on the guess?
I don't know.
50 pounds?
That was a guess.
Wow.
That might be wrong, but you look very good.
You look very nice.
I'm not Ethan Nicole, and that's a disappointment to the fans, Kyle.
And Ethan is losing weight, I just want to say, and he looks great.
It was just an offhanded comment.
Anyway, so today we're talking to Jeff Deist.
Jeff Deist of the Mises Institute.
President of the Mises Institute.
And he hosts a podcast called the Human Action Podcast.
So he's an economist?
Economists are, you know, they're...
Well, is he an economist?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But he knows about economy stuff.
He does know about it.
I mean, I think economists are.
He's read it as a layperson, so got into Mises.
Well, you can't be the president of the Mises Institute, not at least be economics adjacent.
Am I right?
So anyway, definitely economics adjacent.
He's more of an economist than I am, or anybody in the central banking.
He's the best.
He's the most economist of economists that are here in this office.
Well, anyway, he's a smart guy.
And when we'd interview smart guys, they're like, they're just, you know, I got to bring the flavor.
I got to bring the color.
I got to bring the life.
You know, because he gives us these very serious answers.
Yeah, you would throw something out there wild, and he would just be like, well, that brings up a really interesting point about you could almost see the matrix code like going down his eyeballs.
He just sees through it all.
He's like, I just see Blonde, Brunette, you know, Ron Paul, whatever.
And he just, he sees, he doesn't even see the code anymore.
He's got it all figured out.
Anyway, this is a great interview.
We talk about lockdowns.
We talk about the economy.
We talk about defund the police, Black Lives Matter.
We talk about the virus and how all those numbers were played and how the economy worked and all that.
And then, if you're a subscriber, and if you're not a subscriber, you should subscribe to BabylonB.com slash plans.
You can get the full interview.
We hear about his time working with Ron Paul, former Congressman Ron Paul, hero of ours.
We get into Trump.
We get into some very insightful comments about the rise of Trump and what that all means and populism and all that.
And then we also talk about his days as a heavy metal guitarist.
Oh, man.
We got a secret photo sent to us by an anonymous source who we can't reveal.
And he was kind of shocked that we had that photo.
Jeff Deist being the heavy metal guy, not Ron Paul or Trump, just to be clear.
Just to be clear.
Yeah.
Yep.
All right.
Let's jump in.
Welcome, Jeff.
Well, thanks for coming on, Jeff.
It's great to have you here.
Excellent.
Thanks for having me in person here.
Yeah, this is awesome.
It's nice to sit down with regular people.
You know, no masks.
No masks.
And that's crazy.
A little normalcy in our life.
So that's good.
So how screwed are we?
Well, it depends on how you want to look at that.
In many ways, we're the most fortunate people who ever walked the earth.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, the average Americans have hot and cold running water, some kind of roof over their head, electricity, air conditioning, probably a vehicle in the garage, probably some measure of food in their fridge, and medical and dental care, and an overall standard of material living, which kings and queens would have been jealous of just a few centuries ago.
But, you know, that's the optimistic take.
The pessimistic take is that these people we call governments and central banks just have this perverse hell-bent desire to wreck it.
And so this is something I think about a lot because, you know, I'm a little older than you guys, but we come from a time and place where we're pretty soft relative to the people who survived, let's say, the Great Depression, certainly the people who went through the Civil War.
And, you know, what if it all went away?
In other words, we sort of imagine that material wealth just animates and materializes around us every day.
And there's freeways and 10 million Starbucks and Hampton Inn and Chick-fil-A.
And, you know, it's not guaranteed.
That's what concerns me so much about people, particularly under 30, but really even under 40, is that when you grow up in a time and place of plenty, it becomes very easy to believe in things like an AOC or a Bernie Sanders or something like that because you don't understand what it takes to produce wealth and energy and clean water and all these other things because they've always just been there.
They're kind of like the background.
They're like the plants in the room or something, but they're not the background.
They have to be produced every day by the unbelievably coordinated actions of millions of people.
And we could screw it up.
So, you know, I'm a father, and so that's my main concern.
Yeah, it's like walking a tightrope because I ride this line where I'm like optimistic on the one hand and yet completely in despair on the other hand, you know?
And I don't know psychologically.
Can I just get free therapy from you?
Like psychologically, how do we well?
I don't agree with progressives, and there are progressives on the left and right, and there are progressive libertarians.
I don't agree that there's this happy deterministic arc to history.
Sure.
Sometimes history goes sideways, sometimes it goes backwards.
I mean, that's just a fact.
So it's up to us.
And I think we're imbued with free will.
And I think we have to go out there and make the case for a rational world.
And if we don't do that, given the material circumstances we're in, then we have no excuses relative to our ancestors.
I think Chesterton wrote about how GK Chesterton, he believed the world was originally good, from a religious perspective, that God created the world originally good.
And so I think maybe there's this divide with someone who has a more conservative bent that says the world has things that are worth defending, versus progressives who don't necessarily believe that our society is good on any level or on most levels.
But they do believe the arc of history is ultimately good.
So he drew that distinction.
And I don't know how originally good we believe the world was, but I do think that that's an interesting way to look at it.
Well, absolutely.
Really up until the, you know, well through the 20th century, most academics in America believe that there was a scientific inevitability to socialism.
Sure.
That that was the full and final expression of the political organization of society.
Now, thankfully, we've injured that a little bit with books and with history and with prosperity, but there's still an awful lot of people who believe in this.
And it's a real problem.
Yeah.
It sure is.
Well, speaking of books, have you read all of these books?
Well, I see.
I'm going to have to give a shout out to my good friend Bob Murphy.
I see a couple of his books out there.
We wanted to make him feel comfortable.
Yeah.
Surround you with things that you're familiar with.
Also, I want to kind of flex my street cred that, you know, are these all yours?
These are all mine.
Is it your personal collection?
Rothbard, Mises.
My personal library.
Okay.
Fast shit.
Okay.
Murphy, Hazlitt.
What is this?
That is Bob Murphy's high school textbook.
Oh, wow.
It's good stuff.
I went to public school.
I've never seen that.
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about the Mises Institute.
So you're the president there.
Right.
And how did Mises get started?
What's it all about?
What do you guys do there?
Well, most of all, we try to make the case that proper sound economics ought to be considered and listened to and thought about because it's not being presented in universities or in high schools.
And more broadly, we try to promote civilization, which starts with freedom.
It starts with humanity.
It starts with choice.
It starts with non-state actors, civil society, markets, people getting up every day and doing what they do to help each other in a cooperative way, as opposed to what we consider a depretary state or what's become one at any rate.
So a lot of what we do is trying to make people aware of Austrian economics, some of the big thinkers involved in it.
So that's, you know, publishing conferences is, of course, one of our big jobs.
But, you know, beyond that, we hope that we're a beacon of light for people.
We hope that we're a bit of a civilizational outpost.
I mean, there's just, there's so much garbage out there.
There's so much white noise coming at you every day.
And social media added a whole nother layer.
We've got 24-hour news.
You've got the political class.
You've got just everybody's online, especially during COVID.
And it's just so much.
And I mean, Trump didn't help with the sort of anti-intellectual atmosphere that I think pervades the United States.
And so, you know, you think Trump was anti-intellectual?
Well, you know, he's not a big book guy, but I mean, there's, you know, there's ideas and then there's the lack of ideas.
The lack of ideas becomes an idea into itself.
It becomes sort of an ad hoc approach to life.
So, you know, ideas still run the world, but they need people to advance them, to promulgate them, and they need people to animate them.
I mean, nobody, you know, there's a reason why people want to listen to a successful person or, you know, a famous person.
There's reasons why nobody wants to listen to, you know, a 16-year-old kid in his basement.
I mean, that's just the nature of reality.
So we have to have ideas, but we have to have people advancing them.
So we got lots and lots of ideas.
That's not the problem.
We got enough books to last us a millennium.
We've got enough thinkers that nobody ever needs to write another article.
Nobody ever needs to make another book.
I mean, we've got all the content.
The problem is the marketing.
The problem is the dissemination of it.
That's where the problem is for people who think like us.
And so you need people to do that.
And so we hope that the Mises Institute is sort of an alternative school for people, a place where you can go and consume just maybe a little bit of econ education.
If that's all you want, follow us on Twitter or something like that, occasionally read an article.
Or if you want to spend the rest of your lifetime as an intelligent layperson really digging into this stuff.
But I'm obviously biased.
I don't think of economics as this sort of little slice of life and it's just one part of how we view the world.
And there's all these other things we got to consider.
I consider economics to be somewhat all-encompassing.
Not in the way that I think a lot of people on both right and left, especially in Christian circles, sometimes jump on the free market folks and say, oh, you know, you guys, it's just homo economicus.
All you care about is economics and growth, and you'd sell your grandma for another two points of GDP or whatever it is.
And you're missing out on the human element of all this.
And so I don't see it that way.
I see economics as another word for social cooperation.
And so when we think of what human beings get up and do every day when they're not coerced, when they're not, you know, God forbid, in a prison camp or whatever it might be, you know, that incorporates all of civil society.
It even incorporates religion.
It incorporates business.
It incorporates family.
It incorporates civil and social institutions of all kinds.
And so what we found, what we found in spades is that as government grows, all those other things I just mentioned shrink.
Yeah.
And family especially.
And so that's what's so scary right now.
When you talk about economics and you're saying Austrian economics in particular, it kind of sounds like it's not a science in terms of like chemistry or physics.
You're talking about more of a morally fully orbed view of how we look at the world.
Can you talk a little bit about that Austrian school and how that's a little different than what other people might think of economics being?
Well, it's very different.
And first and foremost, we have to understand that economics is a social science.
It is not like physics or chemistry.
You do not apply the same methods, the physical sciences, to the social sciences.
And the fact that we've done that, that's really one of the big stories of the 20th century.
We call it scientism.
The fact that we've done that has really skewed economics into, I would argue, today, almost a useless discipline.
In other words, it doesn't help us understand the world better.
It doesn't predict anything.
It doesn't make us wealthier or happier or healthier or anything else.
So what's the point of a social science?
The point is for it to do those things.
So what used to be understood really well up until I would say the 1930s, especially with Keynes and his general theory, what used to be sort of a mainstream view of economics was that it was an axiomatic deductive science where you sort of started thinking about what humans do and you derive ideas and understandings from that, turned into a very mathematical, empirical, statistical science.
So, you know, if you're a chemist, you're supposed to observe things, maybe draw a few tentative conclusions and build that into a hypothesis and then go test that again and again and again and maybe prove or disprove your hypothesis.
But it's always disprovable in theory, somewhere down the line.
Like in theory, we could still disprove gravity, right?
Because it's not, you know, that's what physical science means.
That's what the scientific method means.
And when you take that mentality and you apply it to social sciences, like psychology or economics, which where we're talking about human actors, we're talking about people with volition and will and irrationalities and emotions.
You know, we're talking about molecules or atoms.
We're talking about something very different.
When you do that, you get very, very bad results, in my opinion.
So if you look at economics, the past, let's just take the past 20 years, which your listeners would be more familiar with.
You know, they were all dead wrong about the housing crash.
They were all dead wrong about the causes of the, of the, you know, of everything in 08.
I mean, we have all these statistical models.
We have all these, all these Wharton grads, you know, and the, you know, the Stanford guys trying to plug in numbers and data and empirics.
And that's all in the rearview mirror.
That's all history, right?
All empirical data is something that by definition occurred in the past.
And so you take that and you try to wedge that into a social science.
And from my perspective, what economics is today, for the most part, is a jobs program for economists in academia, at the Fed or whatever.
And they just crank out a bunch of crap that does us no good.
And that's an abomination, you know, that we're paying for that and that these people have power and authority over us.
And I mean, you know, Jerome Powell, this guy is, I mean, the stuff he's done just in 2020 in response to COVID, the stuff the Fed board has done is just almost unbelievable.
And here we've got probably 95% of Americans walking around just completely ignorant of even basic economics.
And I don't think that's by mistake.
Well, I only understood some of what you just said.
But if you look at something like if you look at something like socialism or communism, is this kind of what you're talking about?
Is that if we approach economics as a hard science, then you just look at people as this like collective group to do experiments on, like, oh, let's try.
Yeah.
Well, it certainly is dehumanizing, I think, to apply the scientific methods, so-called, to human actors.
You can just say, no, this has nothing to do with.
It has something to do with it.
Yeah, it has something to do with it.
And the other thing is that when you aggregate human beings in terms of their actions or their spending habits or whatever they might do, aggregates are for herd animals.
Right.
You know, from my perspective.
Say something smart, Dan.
So what books do you think would be helpful right now?
Because I heard you talking on a podcast with Tom Woods recently on the Human Action podcast, which you do with Mises.
And there's kind of like a thing in our time, just kind of the idea that the debating about the strategy of, okay, we have all these big giant books, you know, human action or whatever.
But then it seems like the culture's collapsing, our economy is crazy, our government is out of control.
It seems like the Mises Institute is all about getting people to learn and to read.
And I'm wondering your take on that.
Reading big books, is that for everybody or what books would be best?
I'm more of a meme guy myself.
Yeah, Kyle responds to memes.
Can you make sense of that?
It's not for everybody.
And I'm not an academic.
I mean, I've read this stuff as a lay person just like you have.
So it's not for everybody, but there needs to be people in society who have read and done deep work and deep study.
I mean, that's just so obvious.
We can't treat economics as something which doesn't exist any more than we can treat the aforementioned laws of gravity.
I mean, this is the thing is that there are lots of people on both the left and the right who think economics isn't real.
They just think, oh, you know, this is just sort of this intellectual veneer and this gobbledygook cover for big business interests.
Let's say that would be your left-wing view.
And the right would say, well, you know, when we need to, we can just marshal economies to produce war production or whatever.
And so because they haven't studied or maybe they have studied, but simply don't accept real economics, they tend to think that you can just do legislatively by will, by force, you can overcome these things.
And that leads to disastrous consequences.
We've seen that again and again in societies.
I mean, you can view the whole 20th century time and time again.
That's been proven both theoretically in big books and empirically in authoritarian societies.
So you have to have that knowledge.
I don't want to be there standing on top of a pile of burning cars in some Mad Max scenario, planting the black Rothbard flag and saying, see, we were right.
We told you guys.
No, that's not the goal.
That's the libertarian dream.
That's the Mad Max.
I'm not an accelerationist, if you've heard this term.
I think that's absolutely crazy.
Bring on like collapsitarian.
I mean, people who say that drive me nuts because, I mean, have they not studied history?
Do they not know what happens when things really break down?
I mean, that's, and the other thing is, is if a particular resistance to something buys another 10 or 20 or 30 years, that's huge.
Right.
I mean, that's time.
And, you know, that might get your kids from stage A to stage B or something.
So, you know, we need people to do the deep work who can explain how things ought to work and how things can work.
But we also need people who can be activists, people who want to go into politics, whatever.
I mean, you need a multi-pronged approach.
There's no question about it.
And, you know, at some point, I run out of patience with people who don't want to view what's going on right now as it really is.
You know, the left is not a pussycat.
Okay.
The left is a ravenous lion in this country.
And they're not kidding.
That's the problem is conservatives and libertarians are kind of joking around.
We're kind of in this intellectual world of what-ifs.
Whereas the left is telling you.
They're telling you and they're doing it.
Now, they might not always be doing it as quickly as they want.
Rothbard said that the left engineers the great leaps forward, a nod to China, which is not funny.
And then Republicans consolidate the gains.
And I think that kind of used to be true until maybe W. W used 9-11 to really accelerate things like Medicare Part D and the Patriot Act and all kinds of terrible things.
But I think there's a lot of truth in that.
And so in my circles, there's this fetitization of saying, oh, we're neither left nor right.
Okay.
Well, that's true in a narrow political sense.
But in a broader cultural sense, it's like, come on.
Look at what the left is doing.
Look at what they're saying.
Look at what they're telling you.
Okay.
Nobody's losing their job for having Black Lives Matter on their Facebook or something.
Okay.
So this is where we are.
And if somebody wants to come.
They would lose their job at the Babylon B.
Well.
Would they?
I mean, you'd end up with- I'm just kidding.
I wouldn't.
Right, they wouldn't, first of all, I suspect.
And second of all, you'd end up with a lawsuit on yours.
Sure.
It was just a joke.
I was just showing.
I'm the joke.
But if somebody wanted to come to me and say, Jeff, you know, this Mises Institute stuff is great.
And I read some Rothbard, I read Semises, and, you know, he really did sort of lay out the case against socialism.
That's all great, but it's too late.
You guys are talking about these big books from 50 years ago or 100 years ago.
And here we've got these serious crises with COVID, with the restaurant shutdown, with the economy, with the dollar, with the deficit.
That's, I think, a valid criticism.
And that's one that we have to get up and say, how do we adjust to this ever-shifting reality?
How do we take these ideas and try to find some purchase for them?
So that's, you know, I think I take that to heart.
So we all need to go vote for Joe Jorgensen.
Yeah.
That's the answer.
That's the answer.
What you're saying?
I don't think you got to do that.
We're not that bad often.
I've never met her, but from what I've told, she's a very good person, great lady.
I didn't know a lot about her.
But, you know, I'm not a big political guy.
I'm not a voting guy.
I'm not a big believer in political action.
Other than at the local level, I'm increasingly believing that we're going to reach a time where the federal government can't even fix potholes, much less, you know, go remake Afghanistan into some Jeffersonian democracy or something.
So I think what's going to happen is you're going to find, and I hope to God that this does happen, is that parts of the country begin to sort of assemble themselves almost in a natural flow.
I think there's a soft secession that's happening right now in front of us.
There's a United Van Lines survey that they put out with their 2020, you know, what states have the most people leaving, what states have the most people coming.
So the leaving states were California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey.
And the big net recipient states were Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.
So all of that is basically people voting with their feet in a certain sense.
And, you know, from afar, I live in Auburn, Alabama, but I've been able to spend a lot of time in Florida.
We're just a few hours from the Panhandle beaches down there.
And I've really been watching Ron DeSantis.
Not a big intellectual guy.
I was kind of down on him at the beginning as kind of a, you know, not particularly intellectually impressive member of the House.
But now that he's governor, I mean, the guy has really done something.
And it's no joke because the whole country now is going to see that South Dakota and Florida are in a very different position in terms of their tax revenue, their housing prices, their unemployment.
And they're going to wonder, you know, was it worth shutting down the world for a 1% virus?
We're going to find out.
And I think the answer is clearly no, it wasn't worth shutting down the world.
So you want grandma to die.
Very sad.
You know what?
Everybody dies.
And this idea that grandma is going to die.
And the thing is, if you could ask grandma, hey, you're 92, would you rather make it six months seeing your grandkids or two more years not seeing them?
Most 92-year-olds would say, of course.
And when, you know, this is really bizarre to me.
And I think it shows the size of the baby boomer cohort is that no matter what age the baby boomers are, that's sort of the age we should all be focused on.
They were the ones telling us never trust anyone over 30 in the 60s.
And now that they're old, it's like, hey, you know, we need to make sure everyone's masking up.
It's like, what we should have done is we should have looked at this realistically and said from the get-go, everybody under 40, just go do what you got.
Just live completely normal lives.
Your risk, your infectious, your IFR rate is the same or lower than ordinary flu.
So that's something we could have been doing the whole time.
And it's a real tragedy.
But the you want to kill grandma thing, I can't recall a time in modern Western societies where we basically said in effect that we need to sacrifice young people and their schooling, for example, the suicide rates among young people, the desolation, the depression.
We have to do this because older people are at risk.
I mean, that seems crazy to me.
That seems like a big lesson that Kyle and I got from Hazlitt, the seen and the unseen consequences.
You can apply that in so many different areas of life of just like, hey, we're going to lock down so we save this particular population.
And you can see the real numbers.
Yeah.
And you don't see those other numbers of the people that are killing themselves.
That book it was short enough for me to read.
So this is the only one I think I gifted you a copy of it through there.
Yeah.
Yeah, this lockdown stuff.
You're talking about local politics.
I mean, you're local sheriff.
You know, I mean, how huge is that compared with who cares who the governor's or the president is on some level?
You know, because like the sheriff of my county is telling Governor Newsom to, you know, go pound sand.
Well, I mean, if Biden wants to impose a national mask mandate, or just, I mean, does he expect the San Bernardino County Sheriff to enforce this?
I mean, what's the enforcement mechanism?
Right.
Good question.
And they're already running into that.
All he's been able to do is say, on federal property, you know, you have to remember because I like how he signed that executive order on federal property.
Everyone wear a mask.
And then immediately he goes out, takes his mask off, and asks.
It's just a perfect picture of the hypocrisy and everything.
So what else?
What else we got?
Well, let's talk about riots, all of the looting and pillaging and social justice movements that are going on right now.
Just wondering what your take is on all that.
Obviously, you're probably against burning stuff down.
It's just the free market, man.
It's just a free market of ideas.
It kind of seems like at least online libertarian world.
And I don't want to paint you as that, but just kind of like the, you know, defund the police.
They're probably on board with that.
Like, yeah, we don't need a centralized government-run police force.
But then, like, we see what's going on.
And it's like, that doesn't seem like the answer either.
Like, this seems a little bad.
Just letting people run and run amok and burn everything down.
It's a little bad.
That's not ideal.
It's a little bit.
Well, I'm going to go out on limb and say the media treatment of those incidents over the summer were a little different than the media treatment of the little brouhaha at the Capitol a week too ago.
The guy with the Buffalo hat became like the new president for a few minutes.
I support Buffalo men.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's very, very tough because we've reached this goofy time in America where we think, oh, property, who cares?
Property can be replaced.
Well, okay.
It's insured, man.
Yeah, they have insurance.
Well, you know, the capital is insured.
We have MMT.
We can just print the money.
But I mean, this idea that it's just property, property, this is such a conceptual misunderstanding.
Property represents literally human energy.
The energy and the effort that humans have made in the past to produce something.
And the idea that you can be dismissive of, oh, you know, just write it off or get the insurance check or whatever is so anti-human because without property, without property, you're standing naked on a two-foot piece of grass.
You know, property is that first calorie that comes into your body.
It's that first stitch of clothing.
I mean, you spend your whole life animating, using whatever brains or talents or your hands or ability you got to try to make a living, right?
To try to sustain yourself.
And people who are dismissive of this drive me absolutely crazy.
And I think, again, it's a symptom of our soft material society where we think there's no real connection between hard work and stuff.
Stuff just, you just deserve stuff.
And if those, you know, Lululemon yoga pants are 125 bucks, well, you know, you smash the window and, you know, they're on sale.
So, I mean, I mean, what's still happening in Portland and Seattle is an absolute joke.
And the fact that the media plays it down so strongly.
This would be another libertarian blind spot.
Oh, you know, there's no media bias.
That's just a right-wing.
Okay.
You know, this sort of thing.
Nothing about believing in human liberty requires me to be oblivious to the reality.
You know, it's not a suicide pact.
So we got a problem there, but I don't know what to do about it.
I honestly believe that police in this country have all the wrong incentives.
Take Disneyland, for example.
Take eBay, for example, two really interesting ecosystems of purely private policing.
So in eBay, you have mechanisms.
You have your reputation, first of all, to worry about as a buyer or seller.
Same with Uber.
You have your reputation as a driver or a passenger, you know, if you're causing problems.
And there are dispute resolution mechanisms.
In Disneyland, my wife and I happen to happen to have a friend who worked, who was a big security guy there.
And, you know, at Disney, there's a fee to enter, right?
And a pretty big one.
So right away, it's like if you're just, you know, a gangbanger looking to have a, you know, a criminal spree, you probably can go somewhere and not pay $100 to find your marks.
$200.
Yeah, $200, whatever it costs to go to Disneyland.
I mean, you have sort of an experimental private society.
And so in Disneyland, they never want any unpleasantness.
So they never want to aggressively arrest someone.
They never want to have a fight.
They never want to have an upheaval.
They don't want to be dragging people off.
They don't want to have lawsuits.
They don't want to have anything spoil other people's day.
They don't want to have spectacles.
So everything is about de-escalation.
And, you know, if you look at the average police force in the United States, when crime goes up, their budget goes up, right?
They say, we need more money.
Crime's rising.
Why doesn't anyone say, well, maybe we should get someone else?
Because you seem to not be doing a good job.
It's the opposite, right?
And so, you know, they have sovereign immunity to prevent them from getting sued if there's perhaps excessive force or brutality involved or they kill someone who shouldn't have been killed.
And, you know, if you look at private societies, call eBay or Disneyland, a private society.
I mean, what they have is insurance.
And so the insurance company never wants to pay a claim.
They never want to have to make a claim with their insurance company.
So the insurance company and Disneyland have aligned interests.
Disney wants a low premium for its casualty or its property insurance.
And so Disney and its insurance company probably work together to make sure: hey, what are the best ways to deal with a drunk guy?
You know, what are the best ways to deal with a shoplifter who's getting that $95 Mickey hoodie or something, you know, without creating a stir?
What's the best way to remove someone from our premises physically, but without clubbing them or beating them or escalating the thing where we might get a lawsuit?
You know, what's the best way to sort of tamp things down?
And I mean, the idea of a peace officer, the Andy Griffith archetype, if you go back and watch some of those old episodes, it's just, it's just unbelievable.
Like the drunk guy will shoot at him from his roof and Andy will just kind of get behind the car and then he'll get and they'll try to talk him down.
Oh, come on.
And then they'll end up ultimately.
You know, that's, we're so far removed from that because police are like these paramilitarized people, especially in LA, for example, during the riots after the George Floyd killing.
You know, what's the Grove kind of near Fairfax there?
Our great academic guy, David Gordon.
I'm just saying it's great.
Yeah.
So David Gordon, who's one of our most brilliant scholars, I mean, he's just an absolutely brilliant guy.
He grew up and lives around Cantor's Delhi, which is on Fairfax, which is kind of near the Grove shopping center.
The Grove has some fancy, you know, Apple store and all that.
And so the rioters really came, they came very close to his apartment and they actually, you know, sort of destroyed the grove.
And so Cantor's Delhi, which is a very famous place, one of his daily lunch spots, has been closed.
It's just been a terrible situation.
And I remember seeing the pictures on TV of these, you know, these police officers were just in SWAT gear and they looked like something out of a Terminator movie.
And, you know, none of those officers had any sense of David's neighborhood or the people or something like that.
It was just this sort of completely adversarial, robotic-looking person.
And, you know, whereas you contrast that to the town of Auburn, Alabama, where I live, a college town of like 75,000 people.
You know, the cops, people know the cops.
Like the cop might, you might run into him at the grocery.
Like people know his name, where he lives, all that.
So if he was just to freak out at some little incident and, you know, club someone or tase someone or something like that, like it would be a very different kind of vibe because people go to church with that cop or whatever.
And so, you know, when it comes to that sort of thing, like smaller and more locals better.
You know, I look the idea of police brutality, especially against black folks and all.
I mean, there's so many decades and layers to that onion, but libertarians shouldn't try to have these perfect solutions to every problem.
Like, oh, you know, just do this, privatize it, and it's perfect.
It's not perfect.
It's better.
But we have a model which is all about punishment when it ought to be about restitution.
And that's just a fundamental problem.
You know, when you say the state, the prosecutor represents the people.
But if some guy you don't know gets murdered on the other side of LA, it's really his family who are the victims.
And he's the victim, right?
You're just 30 miles.
And so, you know, the idea that, well, you guys 30 miles away then have to pay for his murderer to go sit in California prison at about 70 grand a year.
I mean, you could put him in an apartment with an ankle bracelet or something with bars on the window.
But at any rate, I mean, there's no connection between the victim and the perpetrator and restitution between those two.
It's all just this punitive model where we feed people into prisons and we have kind of a prison industrial complex and we have all these people who have to get paid, the prosecutors, the district attorneys, the defense attorneys, the prison builders, the prison guards, the police.
Everybody has to get paid and we need new bodies every day to be fed into the maw of this system.
And it's not working.
It's definitely not working.
So, you know, if you want to, I guess that's the only thing I'll say that sounds bleeding heart today.
Yeah.
Well, we just want to say on the Babylon B that we back the blue.
But yeah, we should definitely get our cops to all wear like Mickey Mouse costumes or something.
And that wouldn't.
I got a funny story there.
I got a funny story from when I was a delivery driver at the company that you and I used to work at.
And we would deliver construction supplies to contractors and I would take the parts to the military base over here in Moreno Valley, the Air Force Base.
And they'd look at my driver's license, say, oh, okay.
The Air Force Base.
Yeah, that was it.
Like, hey, come on in.
Okay.
They saw me in the truck and, oh, here's your, okay.
And then I went to Disneyland to deliver parts.
They had to have my name like 24 hours in advance.
It had to match exactly my driver's license.
They do the mirrors under the mirrors under the truck.
They had the bomb-sniffing dog go all the way around.
I had to sit there for like 20 minutes to make sure that I was crazy.
They're crazy.
They're the craziest security force.
So, I mean, like, if I was at Disneyland when they're open, not right now, but I would like to feel really safe.
Like, these guys know what they're doing.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
We lost our kid there, our four-year-old, you know, and within 20 minutes, like, yeah, they're on the radio.
We got him.
We found him.
You know, they're just like, they're crazy about it.
It wasn't our fault, okay?
He's a crazy kid.
He ran away.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we're about ready to go into our subscriber portion.
So we're going to go hang out in the subscriber lounge.
You're going to give us all Ron Paul's dirty laundry.
Okay.
We're going to, we have some history about you and heavy metal, and we have a cool picture of you from the old days.
And we're going to talk about it.
I kind of want to talk about Trump a little bit more.
We're going to talk about Trump.
Get into that.
Okay.
Yeah, we're going to find out about this whole Trump, the populist thing, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, how does this all fit together?
Yeah.
We're going to unlock the secrets of the universe in the subscriber lounge with Jeff.
Here we go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
So Ron Paul, tell us all his dirty secrets.
We've dug up a picture of you, sir.
So let's put that up on the screen.
I promised Matt I'd ask him because he's a big conspiracy guy about the great reset.
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